Activision, EA, Take 2, Microsoft. When you hear of the massive amounts of revenue that gaming generates these days, when it comes to your almost all of that money goes to these big publishers. There are a few smaller ones out there, such as that purveyor of the finest games, JoWood, but generally speaking the big companies get the big money. In a style all too familiar from the and businesses, it is the giant corporate entities that get all the attention, glory and money, making it hard for the little people to be heard. As a reviewer I get sent games from the likes of and to give my impression of, but with so many of these titles the impact my views have can be minimal in the face of the onslaught of their marketing machines. So when a title comes along from a small team, one with zilch in the way of hype and advance information I feel a greater burden of responsibility than I do with something like Dungeon Siege. My review might be the only way you folks get to hear of this game and therefore will be making a big difference to how many copies the team manages to sell.

So what is the game then? It’s a space exploration contest that goes by the amusing name of Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. The premise of the game is thus; The Exploration Pact of 4578 has expressly forbidden any exploration of Sector Prime by any unauthorised ship, a rule that will stay in place until the imminent Thorium Fission drive has been fully developed. All five continents of the Erath are poised to take advantage of the great opportunities that may lie in Sector Prime. This is where Lextor Mucron, robot smuggler, Tiberium moonshiner and gangster, comes into your life. He proposes a risky longshot, offering you a ship, crew and basic systems to go on a ten year round trip of exploration, discovery, combat and exploitation, illegally reaping the spoils for your combined personal profit. Collect what you can find and bring it back for glory and money, or die trying.

The thinking behind the game is to take this story and deliver the player a compact and quick gaming experience, with the whole title designed to allow you to finish it quicker then you can go through the first two chapters of the manual of something like Masters of Orion. Or two smokes, depending on your yardstick. The ten year time limit is your major incentive, with your overall score going down for each week you go over your due date. There’s no mucking about getting the whole thing rolling either. Run through the small installer, click on start, name your ship and captain, choose your difficulty settings and then it’s off you go, blazing away into uncharted space with money on your mind and your mind on your money.

The interface is simplicity itself, with all exploration done on a single screen, all combat on another near identical display, all control through the mouse. The largest view is of Sector Prime, randomly generated according to the options you chose at the beginning. You have a ship readout at the top left of the display, with your cargo list below that and a target info panel coming in at the bottom. The star map consists the various planets waiting to be explored, the path to which is occasionally peppered with hazards such as nebulae and black holes.